☀ Today's Poem: "Put on that KTNN" Kinsale Drake

My mother was raised on Patsy Cline
and Hank Williams country
that bounced in on her father's radio.

Even today, I know I am nearing home
when the pop music crackles
into KTNN, licks

of fluent Navajo flitting between
Loretta Lynn and Johnny Cash.
They are interludes, too,

for drumbeats and throaty covers
of well-loved tunes put on
by some local boys' gas station

banjo and hot-rocket guitar,
a strong woman that sings
the seasons over a hand drum.

Then it is back
to more Loretta Lynn.
All contradictions

find a home in the body, the insect-skin
of the car sluicing the Arizona desert
as the cicadas pick up their grand

instruments. How else to know
you enter a land of monuments, not
a wasteland, loved by radio waves

and peach trees
and small, silly dogs that bridge
the distance between a chapter house

and the nearest Sonics in a city.
The moon rocks darken into pine,
pine into slickrock,

and the whole world remembers
what it once was—
grand ocean: sun, plankton, pearl,

blood, ancestor, cloud. Radio rainbows
the most violent parts of the land
thrashed by thunderstorms & sea

as the rattles pick up their backing track
and Hank Williams rolls in
all over again, easy and easy

and blue.